Sprawled Out in Atlanta

Cobb Parkway winds past the base of Kennesaw Mountain, where 150 years ago 4,000 soldiers died in one of the first, and bloodiest, battles of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign. The mountain looms over business parks and industrial sites and, at certain times of day, casts a literal shadow over the roaring lanes of traffic. Thickets of signs for gas stations and fast food places line the parkway, but for the most part the tall Georgia pines and lush undergrowth still dominate the drive.

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When you reach White Circle, you can turn east to get to Hamilton Grove, a relatively new subdivision of three- and four-bedroom two-story homes with high-ceilinged great rooms and luxurious master baths that sell in the $300,000s. Or you can turn west on White Circle until you get to a steep driveway that passes a retaining wall on which elegant brass letters read “The Foothills at Kennesaw Mountain.” That sign is for what was intended to be an upscale shopping center, constructed in 2006 of stacked-stone walls and neutrally tasteful taupe stucco. Stores never opened here, and this little strip mall, like dozens scattered throughout Atlanta’s suburbs, remained vacant, a victim of enthusiastic speculation and abandoned ambitions.

In an apt metaphor for how the 2008 recession played out, the shopping center today does have a tenant, but it is not the upscale boutiques and restaurants envisioned by its developer; it’s the offices of MUST Ministries, a full-service nonprofit catering to the surprising hidden crisis unfolding in Cobb County, which for decades has been synonymous with Atlanta’s suburban affluence but now finds itself facing an epidemic of the very poverty its residents were determined to avoid when they moved out of the city. There’s a food pantry, a free clinic, a thrift shop and classrooms where people who never thought they would ask for help are working on résumés, scouring electronic job boards and strategizing about how to avoid foreclosure. MUST was founded 43 years ago, initially to serve teens and college kids in Marietta, the Cobb County seat. From its origins as a coffee house aimed at urban youth, MUST mushroomed to offices in eight counties in the northern Atlanta suburbs. Demand for its services has never been higher.

“People went to suburbia for the American dream, and it became a nightmare,” says Rev. Dwight “Ike” Reighard, MUST’s president and CEO. “People have such little margin in their lives, it’s staggering.”

To fill in those margins, MUST provides services more often seen, or at least imagined, in the inner city: a “work recovery” shelter for the homeless and unemployed; veterans housing; rental assistance; job training; computer labs; health care. Last year its food pantry distributed $1.25 million in groceries. And over the summer MUST volunteers delivered 247,087 lunches to kids who usually rely on school to provide their one meal of the day. That's more than double what it was just four years ago.

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OPTICS: Riding the No. 10 Bus in Atlanta. (Click to view gallery.)

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There are a number of reasons you might know Cobb County. It is the birthplace of Julia Roberts, the former home of Newt Gingrich and the once—and possibly future—political province of Bob Barr, the former congressman best remembered for leading the impeachment fight against President Bill Clinton. Cobb is known for its good schools, lovely houses, rolling hills, wide-open spaces near the Chattahoochee River, and broad and winding parkways and highways. It is the future home of the Atlanta Braves, the successful suburban suitor that lured the team from its home in the heart of downtown Atlanta. “Low on taxes, big on business,” trumpets the Cobb County government homepage.

As affluent young professionals and older empty nesters flock back into cities across the country in search of better lifestyles, the suburbs left behind are increasingly filled with the working poor and struggling middle class. | Mark Peterson/Redux

Long considered the epitome of red-state suburban comfort, a quintessentially middle-class kind of place where the median income is $65,000 and people pride themselves on owning their own homes, Cobb County now has other superlatives attached to its name. Between 2000 and 2010, the county’s poverty rate doubled to 12 percent. Just last month, the Urban Institute reported that of all counties in the United States, Cobb is where low-income people have the least chance of finding affordable places to live.

This is not an indictment of Cobb County in particular. Rather, what’s happening in Cobb is a microcosm of the dilemma facing suburbs nationwide: a rapid spike in the number of poor people in what once were the sprawling beacons of American prosperity. Think of it as the flip side of the national urban boom: The poverty rate across all U.S. suburbs doubled in the first decade of the millennium—even as America’s cities are transforming in the other direction, toward rising affluence and hipster reinvention. If the old story of poverty in America was crumbling inner cities and drug-addled housing projects, the new story is increasingly one of downscale strip malls and long bus rides in search of ever-scarcer jobs. We can’t understand what’s working in America’s cities unless we also look at what’s not working in the vast suburbs that surround them.

Cobb County has long been a symbol of red-state suburban comfort, but in recent years, it has also become a symbol of the nationwide spike in suburban poverty. Above, an affluent home and a multi-family complex in the Atlanta suburb. | Mark Peterson/Redux

And there’s a lot about Atlanta’s suburbs that isn’t working. Suburban poverty exploded here between 2000 and 2011, rising by 159 percent. Now, 88 percent of the region’s poor people live in suburbs. On its face, there is nothing remarkable about that statistic; after all, metro Atlanta is huge (8,300 square-miles, about the size of Massachusetts), and its population keeps rising (it’s now almost 6 million, equivalent to the population of Missouri). But fewer than 10 percent of us live in the city of Atlanta itself. So it would stand to reason that most poor people are suburbanites; most metro Atlantans are suburbanites, period.

In fact, however, the shift is remarkable. In the 1950s and 1960s, as suburbs like Cobb County sprung up in the pine forests and red clay of the farmland that used to surround Atlanta, it was wealthier people who fled the city while the poor stayed behind. By the 1970s, the poverty rate was about evenly split between the city of Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs. But over the past half-century, the urban poverty rate has held steady as the city’s population continued to grow, drawing millennials and empty nesters, while in the suburbs it has ticked ever upward.

WATCH: Poor and Stranded in Suburban Atlanta

For suburban Atlanta, as in suburbia nationwide, this shift presents some vexing problems. Designed around a car-centric culture of single-family homes clustered in cul-de-sacs served by strip centers and shopping malls, and fueled by jobs reached by commuting to downtown or suburban office parks, suburbs like Cobb County have struggled to respond to denser populations, increased congestion and, as a result of the 2008 recession, a decline in the middle-class jobs that made it all possible. Suburban Atlanta voters, including in Cobb County, have consistently rejected mass transit that might relieve their car dependency. And county zoning ordinances have continued to favor single-family housing over denser development, exacerbating the problem for the poor who are clustered there in ever greater numbers.

As with just about every Atlanta story, the story of suburban poverty is underscored by an inescapable theme: traffic. Transportation is built into the very DNA of metro Atlanta, a region that radiated from a little 1830s railway terminus, grew explosively with the introduction of the postwar interstate highway system and today is home to the world’s busiest passenger airport. But here’s the central irony of Atlanta, a place that exists thanks to transportation and whose economy is intertwined with moving people and products around the country and throughout the world: Those of us who live here are gridlocked.

That literal lack of mobility contributes to a bigger problem: Atlanta has one of the lowest rates of economic mobility in the country. This is the place where a teetotaling pharmacist turned a nerve tonic called Coca-Cola into a global brand and where a former slave named Alonzo Herndon parlayed a barbershop into Atlanta Life, one of the biggest black-owned financial services firms in the country. But today in greater Atlanta, the odds of a poor kid making it to the top rung of the economic ladder are lower than any other major metropolitan area in the country—in part because residential segregation, which keeps metro Atlantans separated not only by race but also by class, has created widely disparate public school districts, further immobilizing the poor.

The metro Atlanta area is also divided in part because it evolved over the past century and a half through mergers of convenience, not political conviction. The region is a patchwork of little cities and a few big counties—connected first by railways and then by freeways. The land between the towns eventually filled in with highways and housing as more and more people moved here. The city of Atlanta, as the hub for all this transit, may give the region its name, but the counties still operate independently, making it hard to come up with any kind of coherent policy for the whole.

Which Cities Are Fixing Urban Sprawl?

By Margaret Slattery

Atlanta may be among America’s most spread out and disconnected cities, but as a whole the rate of suburban sprawl is slowing down across the country, after peaking in the 1990s.

In a new report out last month, the research and advocacy group Smart Growth America ranks “urbanized” areas—those the U.S. Census Bureau defines as 50,000 people or more—according to how sprawling or compact they are. The report’s authors, led by University of Utah professor Reid Ewing, based their index on four factors: residential and employment density; the mix of homes, jobs and services; the strength of activity centers and downtowns; and street accessibility. Comparing their results with 2000 data, Ewing came up with the list below, showing the 25 cities that reduced sprawl the most over the past decade.

So how did they do it? In some cases, it’s a matter of attracting residents to an existing downtown through new housing developments and expanded transit systems; that’s been the approach in Milwaukee, Ewing says, as well as in Los Angeles, once the poster child for car-driven urban sprawl. Other cities, such as Miami, have put in place so-called urban growth boundaries that concentrate building within certain areas. Ewing also points to a widespread pattern of “polycentric” development—cities encouraging the growth of smaller urban “subcenters” situated at transit stops. Think, for instance, of newer and larger downtowns emerging in Arlington and Bethesda, adjacent to Washington, D.C. (which ranks second on the list below). Today, as Ewing puts it, “Suburban communities want to have a there there.”

Atlanta may facilitate the transportation of stuff—more than a million containers and trailers moved through the metro area’s freight yards in 2011, and the headquarters of shipping giant UPS are located here—but its citizens have a hard time getting anywhere. Fortune 500 companies and global firms move here because Atlanta’s airport makes it easy to get in and out of the city; Porsche North America, for one, is building a swank new headquarters just miles from the runways. But poor residents of suburban Atlanta can only reach 17 percent of the region’s jobs, a recent study found, leaving them stranded in low-paying work and trapped in what few isolated pockets of cheaper housing they can find.

Cobb County is huge, bigger than all of New York City. It’s more than twice the size of the city of Atlanta. And just as you could live and work on the Upper East Side and rarely venture to, say, the Bronx, you can live in some parts of Cobb and never see others. The county is essentially divided by I-75, which cuts through it diagonally like a river or a mountain range. On the north and west sides of the highway are the older towns — Smyrna, Austell, Mableton, Kennesaw, Acworth, Powder Springs. More affluent residents live in an area broadly referred to as “East Cobb.” If it sounds like there’s no there there, that’s essentially true. East Cobb consists of mile after mile of manicured subdivisions, nice shopping centers and some of the region’s highest-performing schools, but no actual towns. Marietta, Cobb’s capital, is older than the cities of Atlanta and Chattanooga, founded in the 1820s as early settlers made their way into the Native American-occupied lands of north Georgia. But the area remained largely rural until World War II, when Cobb County was selected as the site of the Bell Bomber factory, which later became a Lockheed facility. In the postwar boom, Cobb grew with suburban developments that housed workers at Lockheed and commuters from downtown Atlanta. As white flight from the city continued through the 1970s, and as newcomers relocating to Atlanta for corporate jobs chose the county for its good housing values and schools, Cobb had a reputation as solidly middle-class and stubbornly homogeneous; in 1980 the county was more than 95 percent white. But as metro Atlanta grew in the 1990s, Cobb became more diverse, with newcomers that included middle-class African Americans who moved to metro Atlanta in the post-Olympics boom and as part of a reverse migration from the North and Midwest to the South. Also arriving—in Cobb as throughout metro Atlanta—was an influx of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, drawn by the rapidly growing economy. Today, Cobb is even more heterogeneous, 66 percent white, marking a drop of nearly 30 percent in a generation.

But with the demographic changes in Cobb—and metro Atlanta’s other suburbs—came other sweeping changes. First, the city of Atlanta converted its public housing projects into mixed-income developments, a move that has been heralded by many but resulted in the displacement of thousands of poor people, many of whom moved to suburbs where housing vouchers were welcomed. Second, as metro Atlanta grew, its notorious traffic got even worse, driving many wealthier professionals back into the city and sending urban property values up and those in the suburbs down.

Then came the 2008 recession, when job losses rippled throughout the region and foreclosure rates were among the highest in the country. At MUST, this change is evident in a very tangible way: Suburbanites who once made donations are now its clients. People who contributed to food drives and took part in the annual Gobble Jog 5K now visit the food pantry and ask for help with job searches. “We are in a unique situation where we face the eroding middle class,” says Reighard of MUST. The recession, he says, has left middle-income Americans struggling with “a depth and a breadth” not seen since the Great Depression.

It’s those downwardly mobile suburbanites who are particularly helpless. “They don’t know how to navigate the system,” says Kaye Cagle, marketing director for MUST. “They have never had to use the bus before. They don’t know how to even start applying for food stamps.”

Counties like Cobb are just as ill-prepared for those beleaguered suburbanites. “Communities have a brand,” explains Karen Beavor, president and CEO of the Georgia Center for Nonprofits. “Cobb has had a brand of affluence—it’s startling to some people that this exists here.”

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Just four miles up Cobb Parkway from MUST, the entrance to Castle Lake Mobile Home Park is almost hidden by a cluster of trees. You drive through the park on pothole-filled roads lined on each side by dozens of trailers. You can hear the sound of a creek at the back of the property, and a family of geese waddles across the road before settling down in the grassy spot in front of a beige-sided trailer.

Ever Rodriguez has lived in Castle Lake for about four years. He works as a cook at Caper’s, a restaurant in a shopping center anchored by a Publix, an upscale supermarket just off Barrett Parkway. Menu items at the restaurant include herb-crusted grouper ($18) and baby back ribs ($14 for a half-rack; $22 for a full). Rodriguez cooks at home, too—with four kids, he has to, he says. “I’m pretty good,” he shrugs. His wife, Maria Garcia, also works as a cook, at Bahama Breeze, in Town Center Commons, less than two miles up Barrett Parkway. I met Rodriguez and Garcia on a sunny April afternoon, as they were walking their son, Miguel, home from the bus stop, along with a cluster of parents and children who live in Castle Lake. Miguel, who’s in second grade at Hayes Elementary School, says math and reading are his favorite subjects; he’s also a fan of Spider-Man.

We stood in front of the family’s trailer, which is butter yellow and surrounded by shrubs and plants. Garcia loves to garden. But she had already begun to dig up and pot her favorites. The family will have to leave Castle Lake; the 52-acre property is under contract to Fuqua Development, which plans to raze the trailer park to build a massive retail complex with a Whole Foods. Fuqua’s mixed-use development will include 30 townhomes—for sale, not rent. There are currently about 1,500 people living in Castle Lake, but what will happen to them is anybody’s guess. (“The developer will be working with them,” says Mark Matthews, the mayor of Kennesaw, the Cobb County municipality that will be annexing the Castle Lake property. Fuqua did not respond to requests for comment.)

“We got a letter telling us we have 30 days to leave,” Rodriguez says. His trailer hook-up at Castle Lake costs $576 a month—and includes water. Even with payments on a trailer, there are few cheaper options nearby, he says. There are several hundred units in a nearby apartment complex that takes Section 8 vouchers, but even those rents are higher—and most of the units are already leased. Rodriguez says that he has found a spot in a trailer park in Acworth, a city about 10 miles away. But moving the trailer will cost $5,000, he figures. “Who can get that kind of money in 30 days?”

From top left, clockwise: Sisters Ana and Diane outside of their home in Castle Rock Trailer Park in Cobb County; Ever Rodriguez and his wife Zuylema Coranado with their 8 year-old son, Miguel Rodriguez; Ana’s husband Avelardo Martinez with their 6-year-old son Angel in Castle Rock Trailer Park; kids come home from school to the trailer park in Cobb County. | Mark Peterson/Redux

It’s unlikely the residents of Castle Lake will have an easy time finding places to live in Cobb. The county tops nationwide rankings for lack of affordable housing for very low-income families. For every 100 households in Cobb classified as “extremely low income,” a recent Urban Institute study found, there are just 2.9 available affordable housing units. Two other suburban Atlanta counties, DeKalb and Gwinnett, also make the top 10 list.

Agencies in Atlanta’s suburbs get just $2 in nonprofit grants per poor person annually, compared with the $72 awarded to their city counterparts.

“The suburbs don’t have low-income housing. They never thought they’d need it,” says MUST’s Cagle. In Cobb, where there are fewer apartment buildings and little traditional subsidized housing, the most affordable places to live are trailer parks like Castle Lake, or older homes in the county’s earliest developments—low-slung brick ranches and split-levels built in the 1960s and 1970s. Politics is a factor here too: Cobb County could have done more but refused to loosen restrictions that control how many unrelated adults can live in a single-family home. Critics say the law was racially motivated, aimed at immigrants who shared houses. “In essence, we limit people’s ability to make unaffordable housing affordable,” says Lisa Cupid, a Cobb County commissioner who tried and failed to change the 2007 ordinance.

Rental houses are often the cheapest option for poorer families in Cobb County’s deceptively Brady Bunch-era older neighborhoods. For instance, a three-bedroom, one-bathroom split-level home on Gresham Place in Mableton, a blob on the map so generic it is technically neither a town or a city but a “census designated place,” is currently listed for $850 a month. I drove out to look at the house, a pretty yellow brick built in 1968. It is the last on a dead-end street. An overgrown ravine serves as a buffer blocking the traffic noise from nearby Mableton Parkway.

But try living in this neighborhood without a car—it is virtually unnavigable. From the house on Gresham Place, the closest bus stop is more than two miles away. To get there, you have to walk along pothole-filled streets without sidewalks to reach the parkway, as traffic whizzes by.

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When it comes to sprawl, only one metropolitan area in the country tops Atlanta—kudos to Hickory, North Carolina, on earning that dubious honor, bestowed by Smart Growth America, an NGO that advocates for denser, transit-oriented development and housing affordability. Metro Atlanta scores poorly on all four factors the Smart Growth researchers use to calculate sprawl: density; development mix; “activity centering” (that is, homes being close to businesses and other services); and street accessibility. In Atlanta, it is often literally true that you cannot get there from here.

Many people once assumed—and not that long ago—that American commutes would inexorably just get longer and longer as middle-class families traveled farther and farther out in search of the best deal on housing. The sedentary lifestyle, the gridlock and the massive cost of filling the gas tank just didn’t seem to factor in.

Left: Sharon McKay and her 19-year-old son Marc Hannah and Marc’s friend Pleasure Delk outside Sharon and Marc’s apartment. Sharon is not working now but has been looking. Marc is a producer of music and has his own company, Deus Beats. They have lived in Cobb County since 2008. Right: Dent "Wildman" Meyers in his famous white power store Wildman's. | Mark Peterson/Redux

But no more. As affluent young professionals and older empty nesters flock back into cities across the country in search of better lifestyles, the suburbs left behind are increasingly stuck with a demographic—the working poor and struggling middle class—they were never built to accommodate. Many of these people don’t have cars, and many of them can’t even easily make it to the bus. In fact, the Brookings Institute has found, fewer than 50 percent of poor suburbanites in metro Atlanta even have access to transit, and what they have is limited. Bus service in Clayton County, which has a 21 percent poverty rate, was canceled outright in 2010. There is no regular mass transit in exurban counties like Paulding or Bartow. In Cherokee County, there are just two fixed bus routes along with a few park-and-ride connections to the Xpress regional bus system, which brings suburban commuters to downtown and midtown Atlanta. If you don’t live or work near one of these nodes, you’re out of luck.

The No. 10 bus route, from Marietta, the Cobb County seat, to Atlanta; you would need two separate transit cards for the route because the two systems don't connect. | Google Maps

In Cobb County, there’s no bus service at all on Sundays. Cobb Community Transit operates a system that is tiny given the immense size of the county—just 20 routes compared with almost 200 operated by MARTA, the transit agency that serves the city of Atlanta and Fulton and DeKalb counties, and also operates a rail network. The bus routes that do operate in Cobb are limited; some run along main commercial arteries (like busy Cobb Parkway where MUST’s headquarters is located), and others are rush-hour-only, taking commuters from Cobb to downtown Atlanta and back. But the Cobb system does not connect to MARTA’s, so if you want to get from Cobb to somewhere within the city or an adjoining county, you have to keep track of two transit cards. If you don’t keep track of transfers, you can get stuck paying for multiple tickets.

And this is no mere bureaucratic problem. It’s by design, a political decision that came out of a time when Cobb County was trying to keep the city out—not make sure it stayed connected to it. Back in 1971, residents of Cobb and Gwinnett counties, both heavily white at the time, voted against joining the MARTA system and rejected it again in subsequent votes, choosing to form their own internal transit systems. Only relatively recently was an agreement hashed out to allow a few buses to cross county lines, which is how the Cobb County buses are even allowed to stop now at stations in downtown and midtown Atlanta.

“Our transportation system as a whole is terrible,” complains Beavor, of the Georgia Center for Nonprofits. In part, says Charlie Harper, a Republican political strategist and transit advocate, that’s because it has been seen and sold historically as a giveaway to the lower socioeconomic classes. For transit to sell in suburbia, he says, “We need to look at this as fundamental to help all of us as a region.”

Given that the current system is so limited, it’s no wonder that only 2 percent of Cobb residents—of any income level—commute using transit. Far more (10 percent) use carpools or vanpools. Even for those who have cars, sheer distances in the suburbs, when coupled with the rising cost of gas, make commuting problematic, especially for those on tight budgets.

Consider Greg and Sarah Jackson. I met them on a blazing Saturday as they stood in front of the Uptown Inn & Suites just off Veterans Memorial Highway in Mableton. Greg works as a truck driver at Kelly Construction, less than a 20 minute-walk from the Uptown, and they had been hoping to find a place here, where studios with kitchens rent for $170 a week. Right now, the couple is staying in separate places while they try to save up for somewhere they can all live together. Sarah and their daughter are living in Marietta, which is near her job at a nursing home. Greg has been staying with friends, and Sarah drives from where she is staying to take Greg to work, then driving back to Marietta to go to her own job. “It was just not cost-effective,” Sarah says of all that driving, which could add up to almost 50 miles daily. “Especially now that gas is almost $4 a gallon.” The cost of transportation is so high that saving up to get ahead—like the deposit for a rental house or apartment—is almost impossible, says Greg: “It’s why a lot of people get stuck.”

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Here’s the most complicated problem with poverty in the suburbs: It’s almost invisible. There are 86,000 people in Cobb County who live below the poverty level. But you could live in Cobb your whole life and never see them, or at least not knowingly. Cobb County covers 339 square miles and is home to 717,000 people. Its poor residents can be lost in the crowd—and lost in all that space.

The sprawling geography means that many commuters obliviously whiz by the entrance to a place like Castle Lake trailer park, or the entrance to a subdivision where families crowd into small 1960s brick ranches. In dense city blocks, outward signs of poverty are more visible—packed apartment buildings or large government-funded complexes.

Many of the people most at risk are “underemployed,” says Jeri Barr, CEO of the Center for Family Resources, a Cobb-based nonprofit that provides assistance to working poor families, giving rental and utility aid and other services. “They work—sometimes a couple of jobs. Suburban neighbors will see them “maybe working at McDonald’s, maybe cleaning your house,” Barr says. “People don’t think of them as poor because they’re working. But they can’t afford to even eat at McDonald’s.”

Twenty-one-year-old Joshua Calep in his car. He has just started a new job at a sheetrock factory and is hoping he likes it. He's worked several jobs recently that were too dangerous and such low pay he quit. He's lived in the Atlanta area most of his life. | Mark Peterson/Redux

Because in many people’s minds, poverty is an urban problem, or perhaps an issue of remote and rural areas, it’s harder to get financial support for services in the suburbs. According to Brookings, agencies in Atlanta’s suburbs get just $2 in nonprofit grants per poor person annually, compared with the $72 awarded to their city counterparts. And it can be harder for suburban nonprofits to raise funds because neighbors don’t want to believe these problems exist in their communities. Says Barr: “People want to believe they live in a perfect world.”

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Every day, 15,000 cars travel from Cobb Parkway onto the Canton Road Connector, which takes them over to East Cobb and then up to Cherokee County. Dense groves of Georgia pines buffer the road on each side. There is nothing remarkable in the landscape here; it looks like much of suburban Atlanta—wide roads, tall trees, patches of red clay.

But pull off on the shoulder, trek just a few yards off the side of the road, make your way through the trees and brush, and you reach an encampment, one of several throughout metro Atlanta. Half a dozen tents of various vintages have been pitched, and a sort of communal “shower” area has been created by stringing industrial black trash bags from tree to tree. The camp has been here for several months; its residents have drifted here after outstaying their time at MUST (which keeps people in its work-recovery shelter program for 42 days) or other shelters, or after running out of rent money.

Off the shoulder of the highway route to East Cobb and Cherokee County, a tent camp temporarily houses those who have outstayed their time at local homeless shelters. | Mark Peterson/Redux

Late on an April afternoon, when storm clouds were threatening, four people sat around an overturned milk crate, playing a game of spades. One of them is Anthony Davis, who earlier that morning had been using the computer lab at a local jobs center to look for work. Another is Mike, who moved to Atlanta from Ohio in November (he wouldn't share his last name). He got laid off a few months ago from his job at a firm called Premier Fitness, selling workout equipment. “I’ve been here almost a month,” he says. Despite the trees that surround us, the roar of traffic makes it hard to hear. “You get used to that,” Mike says. “You get used to a lot of things that you didn’t think you ever would.”

Rebecca Burns is author of three books on Atlanta history. She teaches journalism at Emory University and the University of Georgia and tweets at @RebeccaBurns. She lives in Atlanta.